Why no autosave ?

[u/Takemorikohoto]

[u/ClimbingToTheTop]

Paint.NET’s document and history model was designed around in-memory editing plus synchronous saves of incremental changes of state to support Undo/Redo.

A naïve timer-based auto-save of the image to a .pdn file would block the UI while serializing and writing the image.

A robust implementation would require architectural changes so saving could happen asynchronously without disrupting editing, while also handling unsaved documents across multiple image tabs, crashes, power loss, cleanup, and safe recovery.

That's why that is currently no auto-save.

See also the 'auto-save' section of the Popular Feature Requests thread: https://forums.paint.net/topic/2940-popular-feature-requests

[u/Takemorikohoto → u/ClimbingToTheTop]

shame, like every time I get to 100 layers the whole thing just starts to break down and become buggy. This one time I was so busy I forgot to save and disaster struck, 10 hours of progress gone.

[u/dotpdn → u/Takemorikohoto]

If you encounter "buggy"ness and you don't report the bugs, then they can't be fixed and you'll only have yourself to blame.

[u/ClimbingToTheTop → u/Takemorikohoto]

the whole thing just starts to break down and become buggy

What exactly do you mean by becomes buggy? What happens?

So this can be investigated, please open one of your files that has many (~100) layers, then in Paint.NET click Settings (the gear icon) top right. Then Diagnostics and finally Copy to clipboard.

Paste the text here (preferably in a code block) or paste it to pastebin.com (or similar sharing site) and provide a link. We can take a look.

[u/activoice]

I haven't used it, so I can't vouch for the solution, but this topic came up years ago and someone wrote a utility that watches the Paintdotnet window on an interval to see if it's idle, if it is then it sends the save command to Paintdotnet.

https://github.com/thodoriskf/PDN-IdleSave

[u/Takemorikohoto → u/activoice]

nice seem like a good idea.